Gersmann returns

Joel Gersmann's 11th annual review of his yearly reading list is a typically brilliant evocation of the eccentric playwright's teeming intellectual life. His favorite book is the unknown Austrian novelist Heimito Von Doderer's The Demons, Vol 1, which he compares to "the literary equivalent of a glacially moving Wagnerian opera dipped in acid." The drunken literary icon Charles Bukowski is described as "a lousy poet...[with] absolutely no technique. But what a writer!" Bukowski's description of a long bender is so descriptive, Gersmann advises, that "you can smell the stink of his armpits." The first full-length biography of feminist Elisabeth Cadey Stanton, meanwhile, "seems too short on analysis, too long on facts," but it remains "a fascinating sketch of one of the most amazing women who ever lived." Of In Hitler's Germany: Everyday Life in the Third Reich, he writes: "infrequent acts of heroism are performed by ordinary, seemingly lackluster individuals plus a few genuine weirdoes." Pat McGiligan's book of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters "is a crazy quilt of insider Hollywood gossip and actual writing methodology." The Russian neurologist A.R. Luria's newly translated tomes about "a memory artist who remembered everything but who could understand nothing and a brain-wounded solider who had forgotten everything but desired to remember something...read like eerie monologues from Kafka." The ever-provocative Gersmann died in 2005 at the age of 62. He wrote 28 annual reading lists for Isthmus.